Link round up 4-29-09

Culture

• N’Gai Croal finds a Maureen Dowd column amusing I do as well in this case, though she’s normally not my thing.
• Brainy Gamer discusses Mother 3 (earlier games in English went by Earthbound) The story sounds great and much of it involves one changing community rather than hopping around the world.  Sadly it isn’t officially available in English, but given the raves I might get a bootleg.

Political Economy

• The Monkey Cage notes that Democratic Senators are easy to herd after all and provides the data to back it up.  I think this phenomenon hasn’t been more noticed because as both parties get more unity each defection becomes more important.
• Emmanuel Saez won the Clark Medal for young economists and has done interesting work on equality.  The top 1% had hugely gained of late.  It’s well established that the top percentages tend to gain under Republicans, but I wonder whether that relationship goes both ways and they tend to win more thanks to a larger bankroll.  Such a phenomenon would still be contained by the inevitable crashes brought about by the excesses of inequality.

Rights

• Kevin Drum defends civilization against the torturers.  This might be my favorite tack combined with encouragement to have a stiff upper lip regarding terrorism which isn’t that big of a threat to the U.S. to begin with (See Cold War, WWII).  Manzi notes that countries that torture tend to be losers in their conflicts.
• Andrew Gelman explains that contradictory torture polling might be caused by the fact that people tend to make a lot of exceptions when you offer them specific scenarios.  Thus we probably do better in a big picture debate.
• Justine Fleichner discusses the risks to women from concessions to the Taliban.  I fear some concessions may prove necessary, but we should ensure that Afghan women are at the bargaining table to defend their interests.
• States with more men than women extended the franchise first in case you were wondering, why Wyoming took the lead.  I don’t think political violence was as much of an issue when it came to suffragettes, but we should still probably study our history to learn methods for dealing with Afghanistan.

Comments

[That Fiancee-Type Person]

Earthbound, aka Mother 2, was the only game of the series to make it to the US. It was quirky and fun, and was the only game where you could fight New Age Retro Hippies (with their blindingly shiny teeth), Unassuming Local Guys, drunken angry businessmen, and nosy middle-aged women. And those are just the human enemies. There's also the tragic tale of two sesame seeds in love who are scattered across a desert, plus a mine full of moles who all insist that they're the third strongest in the mine. It was also the game that broke my brother's SNES. ^^; We got to the town full of zombies and then it failed to work, so we called up Nintendo and they had us ship them the game *and* the console. They replaced both with shiny new ones, but Kevin was none too pleased with me for a week.

Anyhow, the point is that if you're curious, we still have it floating around somewhere. Also, please share this emulation with me, as I'd love to play the successor. Scarily, it's been about fifteen years since Earthbound.

Combining gaming and rights: apparently there's a Horde quest in World of Warcraft that involves torturing a prisoner for information. It's written "well," i.e. in such a way that it makes most people very uncomfortable to play it. If you'd like, I can try and get details from my WoW-sources.